The Holloway Sisters’ Breeding Shack — 22 Missing Travelers Found Under the Floorboards (1893)
There’s a photograph that doesn’t exist anymore. It was taken in 1890. Three in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, deep in the hollow country, where the mist hangs so thick you can’t see your own hand at dawn. The photograph showed two women standing in front of a cabin. They weren’t smiling.
Behind them, you could see the edge of a doorway. And if you looked close enough, really close, there was something dark on the threshold, something that looked like a stain. The county clerk who kept that photograph in the courthouse archives said it went missing in 1968, the same year they tore down what was left of the Holway Place.
He said it was better that way. Some things he told a reporter before he died should stay buried. Hello everyone. Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re from and what time you’re watching. That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one. The Holay Sisters didn’t have first names that anyone remembers.
They were just called the Holloway Sisters, or sometimes in whispers, the women in the gap. They lived alone on a piece of land so remote that even the circuit preachers wouldn’t go there. The cabin sat at the end of a trail that wounded through laurel thicket, and over a creek that ran rust, colored even in summer. Travelers used to stop there.
It was one of the only structures for miles, a place where you could rest, get water, maybe stay the night if the weather turned, and for a while people did stop there. Until they didn’t, until the road went quiet, and the only thing you’d hear about the hol place was what the old times wouldn’t say out loud. In the autumn of 1893, a federal marshall named Josiah Karna arrived in the area investigating reports of missing persons.
22 travelers had vanished over the course of 8 years. All of them had been seen heading toward the gap. None of them came out the other side. What Karna found in that cabin would become one of the most disturbing and suppressed criminal cases in Appalachian history. This is the story of the Holloway Sisters and the breeding shack they kept beneath the floorboards.
The hollow where the Holloway sisters lived had a name once, but by the time Marshall Karn arrived, locals just called it the Gap. It was a natural pass through the mountains, a shortcut that could save a traveler two full days if they were heading west toward the cold towns or east toward the Virginia border. The trail was narrow, overgrown, and treacherous in wet weather, but it was known.
Peddlers used it, drifters, men looking for work, women traveling alone, which was rare but not unheard of. The hollowway cabin sat almost exactly at the midpoint, tucked back from the trail by maybe 30 yards, hidden behind a wall of roodendron and hemlock. No one knew where the sisters came from. The land had belonged to a man named Celas Holloway, a trapper who died sometime in the 1870s.
Whether the sisters were his daughters, his wives, or something else entirely, no one could say. They appeared after he was gone, two women who kept to themselves and rarely came into town. When they did, they bought salt, lamp oil, and fabric. They paid in cash. They didn’t speak unless spoken to, and when they did, their voices were flat, emotionless, like they were reciting something memorized.
One was tall and gaunt, with dark hair pulled back so tight it looked painful. The other was shorter, rounder, with pale eyes that didn’t blink as often as they should. The storekeeper in the nearest settlement, a place called Bunisboro, said they made his skin crawl. He said they smelled like rendered fat and iron. The first disappearances didn’t raise alarms.
This was the Appalachian frontier. People vanished all the time. They fell into ravines, drowned in flash floods, got lost in the woods, and died of exposure. Families assumed their sons or husbands had moved on, found work elsewhere, started over. But by 1891, a pattern had emerged. The missing were all last seen near the gap, a peddler named Thomas Creech, a school teacher named Adah Laughaferty, two brothers from Ohio, a preacher, a widow.
They all stopped at the Holloway Place, and they all disappeared. When a postal inspector named Franklin Perry went missing in the spring of 1893, his brother, a lawyer in Lexington, demanded an investigation. That’s when they sent Marshall Kerna. Karna was a methodical man, a former Pinkerton agent who’d worked cases all over the Cumberland Plateau.
He arrived in Bunisboro in late September and began interviewing locals. What he heard unsettled him. No one had seen anyone leave the hol place in years, but people had seen smoke from the chimney. They’d heard sounds at night, faint and distant, crying, some said, singing, others claimed. One man, a hunter named Ezra Goins, said he’d seen shapes moving behind the cabin windows after dark, more than two.
When Karna asked why no one had investigated, Goins just looked at him. “You don’t go up there,” he said. “You don’t go up there and come back.”
Next section, H. Next section. Section three. The investigation begins. Marshall Kern rode up to the gap on the morning of October 3rd, 1890. Three. He brought two deputies with him, both local men, who’d agreed to come only after Kern threatened to report them for obstruction.
The trail was worse than he’d expected. The undergrowth had nearly reclaimed it in places, and there were stretches where the path was so narrow their horses had to move single file. The air smelled wrong, not like rot exactly, but something sour and organic, like turned soil and old meat left in the sun. One of the deputies, a man named Collier, said it reminded him of a smokehouse.
The other deputy didn’t say anything at all. He just kept looking back over his shoulder like something was following them. They reached the cabin just before noon. It was smaller than Karna had imagined, a single story structure with a sagging porch and a roof patched with mismatched shingles. The windows were covered from the inside with what looked like burlap sacking.
There was no sound, no animals, no movement. Karna dismounted and approached the door. He knocked three times and announced himself nothing. He knocked again louder. Still nothing. He tried the door. It was unlocked. It opened with a creek that seemed to echo through the hollow, and the smell that came out nearly knocked him backward. Collier turned and vomited into the weeds.
The other deputy drew his revolver and took two steps back. Kerna covered his mouth with his sleeve and stepped inside. The interior was dim, lit only by the thin light filtering through gaps in the burlop. There was a table, two chairs, a cold stove. Shelves lined one wall stacked with jars of preserved vegetables, smoked meat, and something else Karna couldn’t identify.
Pale and suspended in cloudy liquid. The floor was made of rough huneed planks, warped and stained dark in places. The smell was overpowering. Kern moved slowly, his hand on his pistol, scanning the room. There was a door at the back half open, leading to what looked like a sleeping area.
He could see a mattress on the floor, a pile of clothing. And then he heard it, a sound from beneath him, a faint rhythmic tapping like fingernails on wood. Kern looked down. The floorboards near the center of the room were different from the others, newer, less worn. He knelt and ran his fingers along the seams. There was a gap just wide enough to fit a blade.
He called for Collier, who came in pale and shaking, and together they pried up the boards. What they found underneath would haunt Karna for the rest of his life. There was a pit maybe 8 ft deep and 12 ft across, lined with stone and timber. A ladder descended into darkness, and from that darkness came the smell thick and clawing and something else.
A sound, low and wet, and unmistakably human. Karn lit a lantern, held it over the edge, and looked down. He saw movement. He saw skin. He saw eyes reflecting the light, wide and unblinking. And then he saw the bones. Marshall Kern descended into the pit alone. The deputies refused. Collier was weeping openly by then, sitting on the porch with his head in his hands.
The other deputy had disappeared entirely, rode back down the trail without a word. Karna didn’t blame them. The ladder rungs were slick with something he didn’t want to identify. The air below was thick, almost solid, and breathing it felt like swallowing rot. When his boots touched the bottom, the lantern light revealed a chamber that had been carefully constructed.
The walls were reinforced with timber framing. There were narrow shelves carved into the stone, and there were chains, iron chains bolted into the rock. some still holding what they’d been meant to hold. He counted 11 bodies. Some were little more than skeletons, picked clean and stacked in the corners like cordwood.
Others were fresher, bloated and crawling with insects, but three were still alive. Barely, two women and a man, chained by the ankles, lying in their own filth. Their eyes were open, but they didn’t seem to see him. One of the women was pregnant, her belly grotesqually swollen, her skin pale as candle wax. The man was missing his teeth.
Later, Kern would learn they’d been pulled out one by one, likely to prevent biting. The other woman had scars across her arms and legs, deliberate and methodical, like someone had been marking her. When Kern spoke to them, none of them responded. They just stared, mouth slack, making small sounds that might have been words once, but weren’t anymore. Karna climbed back up.
He was shaking so badly he could barely hold the lantern. He sent Collier back to town with orders to bring the sheriff, a doctor, and as many men as could be spared. Then he searched the rest of the cabin. In the back room he found ledgers, three of them leather, bound and filled with entries in two different handwriting styles.
The entries were meticulous names, dates, physical descriptions, notations about health, behavior, compliance. Some entries included sketches, crude anatomical drawings. Others had measurements, weights, notes about fertility, and bloodlines. The language was clinical, detached, like leavestock records.
One entry dated July of 1891 described a woman named Adah Laferty. It noted that she was strong, healthy, suitable for breeding. It noted that she resisted for 6 days before becoming docsil. It noted that she delivered a child in April of 1892. It noted that the child did not survive. It noted that she was bred again in June.
There were 22 names in those ledgers. 22 people who had walked up that trail and never walked back down. The Holo sisters had been taking them for 8 years. They’d been keeping them in the pit. They’d been using them, and when they were used up, when they were no longer useful, the sisters disposed of them. Karna found the disposal site behind the cabin, a trench maybe 40 feet long, filled with lime and covered with stones.
When the sheriff and his men arrived that evening and began excavating, they found the rest. Bones mixed with ash, skulls crushed to fragments, the remains of at least 11 more individuals, some of them so degraded they couldn’t be identified. The count eventually reached 22, 22 travelers, 22 lives ended in that hollow, and the Holo Sisters were gone.
The Hol Sisters had disappeared sometime between Dawn and Marshall Kern’s arrival. The stove was cold, but there were still coals beneath the ash, suggesting it had been used within the last day. There were two tin cups on the table, half filled with what looked like chory coffee. A pot of beans sat congealing on the shelf.
They’d left in a hurry, but not in a panic. They’d taken specific items. The cash box was gone. So were several jars of preserved food, a rifle that neighbors confirmed the sisters owned, and all their outdoor clothing. They’d left the ledgers behind. Whether that was carelessness or something else, Karn couldn’t say.
Maybe they thought no one would ever come. Maybe they didn’t care. A man hunt began immediately. Passes spread out across three counties, checking every hollow, every abandoned homestead, every cave system in the region. Wanted posters were printed and distributed throughout Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
The descriptions were vague because no one could agree on what the sisters actually looked like. Some said the tall one had a scar across her cheek. Others said, “No, that was the shorter one.” Some remembered dark hair on both. Others swore one was grayhaired, maybe 50 years old, maybe older. The only consistent detail was their eyes.
Everyone who’d met them remembered their eyes, flat, empty, like looking into a well with no bottom. Rewards were offered, $500, an enormous sum for the time, for information leading to their capture. Tips came in from everywhere. The sisters were spotted in Cumberland Gap in Charleston. In Cincinnati, none of the sightings led anywhere.
It was as if they’d walked into the mountains and been swallowed whole. Some believed they’d died out there, succumbed to the elements or wild animals. Others thought they’d changed their names. Their appearance started over somewhere no one knew their faces. A few locals whispered darker theories. That the sisters weren’t human.
That they’d been something else wearing human skin. That you couldn’t catch what was never really there to begin with. Meanwhile, the three survivors were taken to a hospital in Lexington. The pregnant woman delivered a stillborn child 3 days after her rescue. She never spoke a coherent sentence. The doctors said her mind was gone, shattered beyond repair.
She died 6 weeks later from an infection. The man, who was eventually identified as Franklin Perry, the postal inspector whose disappearance had triggered the investigation, lived for 4 months. He never regained the ability to speak. He would sit for hours rocking back and forth, making a wet clicking sound in the back of his throat. He hanged himself in the hospital in February of 1894.
The second woman survived. Her name was Catherine Marsh. She’d been a school teacher from Ohio, taken in the spring of 1892. She was the only one who could talk about what happened in that pit. and what she said made the investigators wish she couldn’t. If you’re still watching, you’re already braver than most.
Tell us in the comments what would you have done if this was your bloodline. Catherine Marsh gave her statement to Marshall Kern in November of 1890. Three. She was 26 years old. She’d lost 40 lb. Her hair had gone white in places. She spoke in a monotone, staring at the wall behind Karna’s head, never making eye contact. The transcription of her testimony was sealed by court order and remained locked in a vault in Frankffort until 1972, when a historian researching Appalachian crime stumbled across it. He read it once and never returned to finish his research. The document is now stored in the Kentucky Historical Society archives. You need special permission to see it. Most people who ask for that permission change their minds.
Catherine said the sisters took her on a Tuesday. She’d been walking the trail alone, which she admitted was foolish, but she was young and confident, and the weather was clear. She saw the cabin and thought it looked welcoming. The door was open. One of the sisters was standing on the porch, the tall one, and she smiled. Catherine said that should have been the warning.
The smile didn’t reach her eyes, but she was thirsty and tired, and the woman offered her water. She went inside. The shorter sister was at the table cutting vegetables. Catherine drank the water. It tasted bitter. She mentioned this. The sisters didn’t respond. Within minutes, Catherine’s legs went numb. She tried to stand and fell.
The last thing she remembered before waking in the pit was the tall sister kneeling beside her, stroking her hair, whispering something that sounded like a lullabi. She woke up in darkness, chained by the ankle. There were others down there with her. She couldn’t see them clearly, but she could hear them breathing, whimpering.
One of them, a man, told her not to struggle. He said struggling made it worse. He said his name was Franklin. He said he’d been there 4 months. Catherine asked what the sisters wanted. Franklin didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said, “They’re building something.” Catherine didn’t understand.
He said, “They think they’re fixing the bloodline.” He said, “They think they’re making it pure again.” Catherine asked what that meant. Franklin started crying. He said, “You’ll see.” The sisters came down twice a day, morning and evening. They brought food, water, and a bucket for waste. They inspected their captives like leavestock, checking teeth, skin, hair.
They kept records in a notebook, making notes by candle light. Sometimes they would take someone up the ladder. Catherine heard what happened up there. The sounds that came through the floorboards, screams at first, then pleading, then silence. When the person came back down, they were different, broken. The sisters called it the breeding. They called it the work.
They said it had been done to them, and now they were doing it to others. They said the blood had been corrupted, that their father had taught them this, that the old ways required sacrifice and patience and pain. Catherine said the sisters never raised their voices. They spoke softly, almost kindly, even when they were doing things that had no words.
Catherine was taken up four times. She wouldn’t describe what happened during those sessions, not in detail. She would only say that the sisters were methodical, that they used instruments, that they kept her restrained on a table in the back room for hours, sometimes days, that they prayed while they worked, reciting phrases in a language Catherine didn’t recognize.
that when they were finished they would wash her, dress her in clean clothes, and lower her back into the pit, and that each time she wanted to die a little more. She said the worst part wasn’t the pain. It was the realization that the sisters believed they were helping, that in their minds this was mercy, this was salvation, this was love.
The Holo case was never solved. The sisters were never found. The man hunt continued sporadically for three years before being officially abandoned in 1896. By then, the story had been largely suppressed. Local newspapers ran brief mentions of the arrests and the search, but nothing about what was found in the pit.
Nothing about the ledgers, nothing about the breeding or the bodies or what Catherine Marsh had described. The official record listed the deaths as murders committed during robberies gone wrong. 22 victims of frontier violence. The details were sealed, the files marked confidential, and the case was quietly buried alongside the people who died in that hollow.
The cabin was burned in the winter of 1890. Three. A group of men from Bunesboro rode up to the gap one night and put it to the torch. They filled in the pit with stones and dirt. then covered the whole site with logs and brush. No marker was placed. No memorial erected. The trail through the gap fell out of use. Within a decade, the forest had reclaimed it entirely.
By 1920, you couldn’t find the site, even if you knew where to look. The land was eventually absorbed into the Daniel Boone National Forest. If you hike through that area today, there’s nothing to indicate what happened there. just trees and silence and the occasional hiker who reports feeling watched. Katherine Marsh lived until 1941. She never married.
She never had children. She moved to Michigan and worked as a seamstress under a different name. She gave one more interview in 1937 to a journalist working on a book about unsolved crimes. She was 69 years old. She told the journalist that she still dreamed about the pit every night, that she could still hear the sister’s voices, soft and patient, explaining that pain was necessary for purification, that bloodlines had to be cleansed through suffering.
The journalist asked if she thought the sisters had been insane. Catherine said no. She said, “Insane people don’t keep records. Insane people don’t have a system.” She said the sisters knew exactly what they were doing. She said they’d been taught. And she said whoever taught them was still out there or had taught others because evil like that doesn’t just appear. It’s passed down.
It’s inherited. It runs in the blood. There are stories still told in Eastern Kentucky, passed down through families who have lived in those mountains for generations. Stories about women who appear on remote trails offering water to travelers. Stories about cabins that seem welcoming until you step inside. Stories about sounds coming from beneath the earth in certain hollows where nothing grows right.
Most people dismiss these as folklore. Campfire tales meant to scare children. But every few decades someone goes missing in those mountains. Someone hiking alone, someone who took a shortcut, someone who thought they knew the trails, and sometimes years later, their belongings turn up in strange places.
A backpack hung in a tree miles from any trail, a pair of boots placed neatly on a rock, a driver’s license wedged into the bark of a hemlock. No body, no explanation, just the woods, keeping their secrets the way they always have. The Holloway sisters were never caught. Their real names were never confirmed. Their bodies were never recovered.
The ledgers were destroyed in a courthouse fire in 1947, along with most of the official documentation. Katherine Marsh’s testimony survived only because a copy had been made and stored separately. The photographs, including the one showing the sisters standing in front of their cabin, are gone. All that remains are fragments. Whispers.
The kind of story people tell and then immediately wish they hadn’t. Because some things once you know them, you can’t unknow. Some truths burrow into you and make a home in the dark places where you can’t reach. And sometimes late at night when the wind sounds like voices and the floorboards creek like footsteps, you remember that the sisters were never found, that they walked into the mountains and disappeared.
And you wonder if they ever really left at all. Thank you for watching. If this story affected you, leave a comment below. Tell us what you think happened to the Hol sisters. Tell us if you’ve heard similar stories from your own family history. And remember to subscribe because there are more stories like this one.
Stories buried in court records and forgotten archives. Stories about the things people did when no one was watching. Stories that remind us that the past isn’t really past. It’s still here, still breathing, still waiting in the spaces between what we remember and what we’ve chosen to forget.
